Being the offspring of English teachers is a mixed blessing. When the film star says to you, on the air, ‘It was a perfect script for she and I,’ inside your head you hear, in the sarcastic voice of your late father, ‘Perfect for she, eh? And perfect for I, also?’
DICK CAVETTThe information superhighway? That sounds like a place that’s long and boring and kills 50,000 people a year.
More Dick Cavett Quotes
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Chris Matthews can’t start any sentence without ‘Let me ask you this… ‘ And I love Chris Matthews! But almost everybody in journalism does it. Who’s stopping you? Just say it!
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Just think of all the billions of coincidences that don’t happen.
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I think we live in an age of increasing mediocrity.
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I have a disturbing problem with losing things. My vulnerability to loss-distress could properly be labeled not only inordinate, but neurotic.
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I don’t think anyone ever gets over the surprise of how differently one audience’s reaction is from another.
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In relative youth, we assume we’ll remember everything. Someone should urge the young to think otherwise.
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Radio, which was a much better medium than television will ever be, was easy and pleasant to listen to. Your mind filled automatically with images.
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I am always shocked that there are still a handful of defenders of the dubious practice of abstinence, surely the worst idea since chocolate-covered ants.
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The trick to writing for people is, you have to be able to turn them on in your head. And know how they’d word something or how they’d inflect it.
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Every time someone says, ‘You know, we really ought to get together,’ if I were really honest, I would ask ‘Why?’
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The brain process that results in a joke materializing where no joke was before remains a mystery. I’m not aware of any scholarly, scientific or neurological studies on the subject.
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Anything seen on TV is, in a subtle and sinister sense, thereby endorsed.
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I have never been converted to or even had much interest in spiritualism, occultism, Swedenborgianism or any particular religion. And I never, except occasionally for a laugh, visit the quacks who call themselves psychics.
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Why are sex and violence always linked? I’m afraid they’ll blur together in people’s minds – sexandviolence – until we can’t tell them apart. I expect to hear a newscaster say, “The mob became unruly and the police were forced to resort to sex.”
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History is not reassuring on the subject of the longevity of seemingly lasting great nations, is it?
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The sudden death at 51 of James Gandolfini is intolerable.
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There were several things a Yale freshman was supposed to be able to do. You had to demonstrate in the Olympic-size Yale pool that you could swim 50 yards or be inducted into swimming class.
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Coming up through the ranks of any calling can be rough, but that battered soul who survives the early years of courting the comic muse comes close to knowing what only the soldier knows: What combat is like.
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I feel sorry for the poor kids whose parents feel they’re qualified to teach them at home. Of course, some parents are smarter than some teachers, but in the main I see home-schooling as misguided foolishness.
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I like when the ice gets thin, the going gets rough, the guests get edgy.
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The greatest benefit of depression is the fact that when I have talked about it, every so often someone comes up and says, you saved my dad’s life.
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My dream was maybe someday, one night I can be a guest on a talk show, and then I will have achieved everything I want.
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I’m the only talk show host, I think, if there’s such a category in, what’s called, the book of records, to have a guest die while we were taping the show, yeah.
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I have yet to see one of those Comedy Central shows with multiple standup comics that doesn’t include someone the size of the Hindenburg.
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It’s a tribute to the human brain that anyone is able to function out there on television in a talk situation that is entirely artificial.
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Perhaps the saddest irony of depression is that suicide happens when the patient gets a little better and can again function sufficiently.
DICK CAVETT